Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook removed 32 Fake Pages and Accounts

As part of our ongoing efforts to prevent election interference, today we removed 32 pages and accounts that were engaged in a coordinated inauthentic campaign, including to organize events like a protest against the "Unite the Right" event in a couple of weeks. It's important that people can trust the connections they make on Facebook, which is why we don't allow fake accounts.

We're still investigating what happened, but whoever created this network of accounts took a lot of effort to hide their real identity so we don't yet know for certain who is responsible. That said, some of this activity is similar to what the Internet Research Agency in Russia did before and after the 2016 US Presidential elections.

One of my top priorities for 2018 is to prevent misuse of Facebook. We build services to bring people closer together and I want to ensure we're doing everything we can to prevent anyone from misusing them to drive us apart. That's why we're investing so heavily in security — including more people and better technology — and working with law enforcement as well as other tech companies so we're better prepared for these threats.

Security isn't a problem you ever completely solve. We face sophisticated and well-funded adversaries, including nation states, that are always evolving and trying new attacks. But we're learning and improving quickly too, and we're investing heavily to keep people safe.

We just shared our community update and quarterly results. Our community now has more than 2.5 billion people using at least one of our apps each month.

We continue to invest heavily in safety and security. This quarter, our systems identified and removed thousands of fake accounts, pages, and groups before the Mexican elections. We launched our tool to make political advertising much more transparent, including letting you see who any political or issue ad is targeting, how much they're spending and more. This is a higher standard of transparency than TV or print ads. Beyond this, we now have 20,000 people working on security and content review across the world. As I've said in past quarterly updates, we're investing so much in security that it will significantly impact our profitability.

In addition to keeping people safe, we also have a responsibility to keep building services for people to connect in meaningful new ways. We recently launched IGTV to help people connect with creators and build community around video. We've seen inspiring fundraising campaigns to help reunite families.

We still have a lot of work to do, but we hope these improvements make our services better for everyone. Thanks for being on this journey with us.